Personally I think that the rabina brothers gave away the source code of generally to some people, not to keep it for themselves but to improve it for all the community to enjoy.

can someone contact the rabina bros?

Sat Feb 03, 2018 9:32 pm

Black Rebel

Joined: Thu Apr 01, 2010 9:52 pmPosts: 453Location: No one knows.

Re: Developer Blog

Crowella wrote:

The main issue is this. I want to have faith in GR 2.0.

I backed the kickstarter with more money than an AAA title costs to buy, because on per hour of gaming, I've probably spent more time playing GR than any other game so I thought on a money side, it's worth it. The main thing I want is another version because I do think the game is worth preserving, maybe as a result of nostalgia or otherwise.

Yeah, I'm critical of how it's been handled so far. I'll go on record and say that the criticism of the development so far has been fair and just especially when looked at the space of updates, what we've been given, what we've seen and how it has been handled.

I've stopped feeling like the project has been one of passion and rather more of one than control and nothing made it more clear than the FAQ section. There stopped being a heart behind it and it seems like more and more of the community (what's left of it) is getting disappointed by it. It's clear when they dropped the community link on the new site that it doesn't want to be handled (first with this community being "unofficial" then dropped altogether) and the FAQ section at the end sounds more like an attack at those that want something, anything.

I should remind people that way before GR 2.0 went into different hands, I managed to get a hold of one of the Rabina productions about discussing putting the code in public back on the RSC forums. I feel sad that fell through but at least it opened the options up and there was at least a worthwhile update of GR 1.

There's coming moments where I just want to put my hands in the air and just say, I'll do it. I really, really want to but I need to build more skills before doing it and also keep tight lipped until there's something that's virtually done to avoid the mistakes being made here.

Right, clearly this perpetual cycle of update -> excitement; no update -> mindless void of rumours, is serving absolutely no-one’s interest – so I have some stuff to say.

I’m not much one for talking about personal things, but I guess on this occasion I’ll make an exception. Frequently, my overly-verbose way of writing gets me accused of politicking, but really I just like words (and this is the first of several ironic statements you’ll find in this post)

It's a big request, but I'd appreciate if folks could read it through before reacting - this is the best I can do, really.

First off, whilst I sort of understand why it’s occurring in this scenario, I’m really not big on the “let’s start hurling insults” and the “let’s make up s**t about someone’s personal life” sort of approaches to discussion. I’ve never really understood this point of view, not just here, but anywhere in life – it seems like a real waste of time to sit around trying to fabricate something about someone else. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given how well tabloid newspapers sell I guess it’s in the absence of information, any kind of information fills the void, whatever its validity.

I’m not particularly interested in going into addressing every tiny thing that I think is completely misguided and misinformed, but there are a few that I’d like to clarify, because I think the perpetuation of the particular pieces of misinformation are harmful to everyone with a genuine interest in GR (and yes, before anyone goes there, that includes me). I’ll handle a few of the big ones first, then a few smaller ones.

For clarity, I agree 100% with Crowella when he says, "the criticism of the development so far has been fair and just" - you'll hear no arguments to this from me. I plan, implement and manage software projects for a living - on projects vastly more complicated than GR - and if any developer working with me had done this poorly, he'd have been fired a long time ago (but, more on that below).

Why isn’t GR open-source?Because I literally have a piece of paper here, that I signed, that dictates that I’m allowed to work on GR, use its source in derivative products, sell those derivative products, whatever, but I’m explicitly not allowed to provide the source to any third-party not directly involved in the closed-source development of GR. The only other provision of note is that if anything is sold, there is a royalty to pay on profits to Hannu & Jukka.

I could take a photo of the license agreement we have, with today's newspaper, and my own face... pointing at the clause that literally forbids us from distributing the source code, and it probably still wouldn't be enough for some people (for clarity, I’m not going to do this – don’t post your legal agreements on the Internet: it’s really dumb).

People seem to think we went to Hannu and Jukka, asking for the license to be "closed source" - but that's so far from the truth, it's not even funny anymore. I even asked Hannu about allowing us to open-source GR (as a whole or in “part” if they felt it wasn’t possible entirely) – he and Jukka considered their point of view, and decided they were happy to release the code on the condition it was not open-sourced.

We agreed to, and have respected, what Hannu & Jukka saw fit to license - without that, there was no future of any kind for the GR source. There wasn't even a plan for GR2 at the time we initially came to an agreement - this was only amended later, when all parties thought it would be better to start afresh (due to a similar set of circumstances that led to GR also not being open-sourced). I really don’t agree with the comment I saw the other day that Hannu & Jukka are “douchebags” – anyone who puts time and effort into a project they created, deserve to decide its fate.

Hannu and I had been talking for literally years about the GR source before any of this happened - and not about giving it to me, but giving it to anyone: it just wasn't on the cards. I’d suggested to him other people who could have taken on the project, but for whatever reason, he was only happy to license it to me (and only, eventually, after years).

Interestingly, I didn’t even have a “current” conversation with Hannu about this leading up to the licensing – out of the blue one day, in reply to a stale email thread of many months old, he sent me a zip file of a “new build” and some explanation about what had changed since the last release. 9 months later, Hannu handed over the source, provided some insight into various decisions and the numerous “black boxes” GR contains – and the rest is history.

It’s just worth remembering, that without Hannu agreeing to license the source to myself and Markku, the last GR version would have been released in 2003. We’ve corresponded on major decisions and on major version releases, but that’s about it – I gather he and Jukka are happier knowing GR is no longer their responsibility.

What are you actually trying to achieve here?Honestly? Both Markku and I just want to make a fun, and worthy, sequel to GeneRally… we don’t really want to make another version “just because”, but because there are things we’d like to improve and like to add (primarily more cars, and some avenue for multiplayer) that really aren’t that viable in the current situation.

I actually had a discussion with Hannu about the possibility of both of those things, before we even wrote a single line of code, and it was his impression (after making a “working prototype” of more cars), that it just wasn’t that viable in the state GR was in. For example, the only real way we could get the moving cones working… yeah, those are “cars” – they have stats and everything.

If it was as straightforward as just bolting stuff onto the back-end of GR as-is, then that would have been better for everyone: quicker turnaround, and far less for Markku and I to do.

We honestly considered releasing the update to GR completely “anonymously” (well, without our names anywhere), but figured it was probably better for some kind of community interaction if we actually had a point of contact (some fierce irony here, considering how infrequently we actually post anything…). Furthermore, Hannu and Jukka did not want any level of involvement with the updates – and they certainly wouldn’t have appreciated folks bombarding them with questions. But, I guess that now qualifies as “always has to have his name on it” – damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

As far as funding goes: both Markku and I are financially secure, and have no real intention to “get rich” off the back of GR (that is a distinct statement from we “completely refuse to ever make money from GR” – for complete clarity).

So, what’s the state of the project?As mentioned above, a bit of a mess – but not really for the reasons some people are probably imagining. It’s definitely a mess by “software development project” standards, but fortunately/unfortunately, this isn’t a normal project.

It really ties in to why we’re incredibly terrible at writing posts about progress – because I think we’re now on maybe the 6th or 7th iteration of the track loader/importer; the 4th or 5th version of the car physics; the 3rd lighting model; maybe the 4th or 5th implementation of the way skidmarks are generated (it has a surprisingly high performance impact); etc. We’re rewriting so many things, just because the pace of development is slow… something gets out-dated, or performs really badly when integrated with something else (keep in mind, we’re aiming for really low specs again), and the cycle repeats.

If you know you’re going to have 16GB of RAM, 4GB of VRAM, and a 4GHz processor to throw at your game, you can do whatever you like in almost any way you like – but we’re trying to keep to the mantra of GR being playable on older machines comfortably. Probably some of this falls into the realm of premature optimisation – but both Markku and I find these iterations quite fun, which leads to us getting drawn into them perhaps a little too often. This is something we’ve realised recently, and we’ve made some changes to ensure we don’t spend all our time rewriting things we already did.

Speaking of Markku, he’s pretty obsessively trying to keep a GR1 feel to the physics, whilst also allowing for car makers to really exploit some new features (like actual suspension, weight balance, etc.). Making “some car physics” is trivial, remaking GR’s car physics – without simply replicating the primitive way GR handles physics – is not that straightforward.

We also went back over a whole tonne of comments from KS and from the forum here (and other places), and decided to ditch the objects and start from scratch – they just didn’t feel “GR-y” enough for us. Currently we’re working with mostly placeholder stuff again, but we’ve got someone available to provide assets for us once we tie down what we actually want.

I’d say we’re not a huge distance from something broadly playable – but the time estimate for actually getting from “okay, everything’s a mess but we’re getting there” to “playable” is just not something I want to hazard a guess at. We’ve missed pretty much every estimate we’ve set so far, so it’s clearly not something we’re great at (and somewhat normal, considering the amount of free time really fluctuates).

Why don’t you just make more, small update posts?Because it’s really just not fun for us. That’s not a good reason, it’s just the reason it’s been the case so far. I guess this is something that can be seen from two perspectives: posting updates about rewriting things for the nth time just leads to dissatisfaction and complaints about not making progress; and not posting updates about rewriting things for the nth time just leads to dissatisfaction and complaints about not making progress and the lack of information.

I know that’s not the full story, and I know that people appreciate something over nothing, but it’s pretty demoralising to write, before even thinking about the possible responses.

I suppose the logical follow-on to this is, “what are you going to do about it?” Honestly, I’m really not sure. Every single cell in me feels like saying “probably nothing” – that’s my default response to feeling like there’s not much that looks like progress. We’ve said a few times “when we have something new, we’ll post about it” – but our threshold for that seems pretty high (some whole feature, rather than maybe just “some improvements”).

Neither Markku nor I are really the social media types – and we’re both very private individuals – so sharing “this is what I did today” is not really something that comes naturally. Most of the blog posts we’ve written have taken hours upon hours to write, tweak and perfect – so it feels like when you sit down one weekend to make some progress that your choice is: “I can improve the way the AI works” or “I can write about how little progress we’ve made.” I think you can guess which wins time and again.

For some context, Markku is currently writing his PhD thesis… and I’m a father of one (soon to be two) – free time isn’t always as available as it might have been a decade ago and, in honesty, I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to do something with my son to work on GR at any point. If that means it takes until he leaves home for University, then so be it (but that’s not the intention).

For some context, a few months ago, I sat down and worked out a neat system for pulling leaves off trees as the car drove past, and have the leaves fall onto the track - that was fun, but spending a couple of hours writing a blog post about it is just… not quite as fun.

The best thing I can say right now is: we’re open for suggestions as to how to better handle communication – it’s really just not something that comes naturally. Markku and I need to have a bit of a chat about what our threshold for “news” is, and hopefully we can work something out to everyone’s satisfaction.

Why did you remove the Community section from the website?I forgot to link it in the menu when building the new site, and didn’t notice until someone here made a post. The new site is built with a static site generator, and missing a definition in one place means it doesn’t build the menu link in – I failed to notice it when uploading.

It’s fun to theorise about more sinister ideas, though…

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” -- Hanlon's razor

Why is PGR at the same level as GRIF on the website?Ah – the answer to the question literally one person is asking. There are two reasons here.

Firstly, it’s been that way for the last two iterations of the website (I checked). The “unofficial” vs. “official” thing was decided between Tuomo, Ivo and myself a long time ago – but again, it’s fun to think of more sinister reasons

Secondly, the only “donation” we’ve ever accepted for GR was from Crono for the domain name – Crono runs PGR – and so we thought it was fair to list PGR there as a “thank you” for his generosity. Crono, Ivo and Tuomo also form the backbone of our release-testing and have all provided incredibly valuable input and support over the years… so I always like to try and factor in things that give them a bit of recognition for their contributions to keeping the GR community alive.

-----

I don’t really have a lot to add to all of that – and I am, in theory, happy to answer further questions (though I’m not going to go as far as to say I promise to answer every question).

If you’ve read this far: thanks for your patience. As much as it may not seem it, Markku and I genuinely do appreciate the support that’s been given over the years (and the reasoned criticism) – and we’re never thinking “how can we annoy the hell out of everyone next time?!”

Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2012 11:13 pmPosts: 1956Location: The good ol' US of A

Re: Developer Blog

So, just wondering, why are you spending time making eye candy like leaves that can blow off of trees when it seems like there are a lot more core game mechanisms that should be a priority to get the actual game playable?

I saw the Facebook post the other day so it regained some interest to lurk for further news. Thank you for the message above.

Do you genuinely believe GR2 is worth pursuing? It's been years since the idea was first promoted and honestly it's ruined GeneRally and the community that had been strong well after the original GeneRally release. It certainly affected me, and then I lost interest all together when no doubt others felt the same..

Also, following your Facebook post, it did cross my mind why do you not ask about releasing GR1 on Steam for free (you may have done this). Perhaps it may help to regain some form of fanbase, especially if you can promote GRIF as an official forum (digging up old debates there).

Alright, it's time I step out of the shadows for the first time in half a decade and throw in my 2 cents. I was going to wait a few months to drop something special I have been working on for a very long time (pretty much since the beginning of my hiatus with the foundations set before then) but I feel this is more important for the time being:

James, you are on the absolute cusp of complete and utter failure. GR2 should have been the start of a new chapter in the history of the game. Instead it's something that has almost broken us apart. Whether or not this damage is reparable we will only be able to tell with time. Because currently the way I see it, and the way that many other disillusioned members of the community are seeing it, you are slowly destroying the integrity of this website and its userbase through inactivity and the sustained hoarding of all available power to yourself. You can sit there and accept all the abuse we are hurling your way and drown us out with 1000 word or longer diatribes, but the key thing is this; actions speak louder than words. From the very start of GRIF you looked to secure everything you could get your hands on, including the very lifeblood of the game itself.

We accepted it, because we trusted you. We had no reason to believe that you would disappoint us. And I'm not suggesting that you are the core reason for this recent spate of discontent, but I would be lying if I said you weren't augmenting it in some capacity. To dismiss a whole 18 months of complete radio silence as a "minor annoyance" is an understatement to say the least, and almost insulting. It's clear that this is something you and Markku are not enjoying in the slightest, so why press on if your hearts aren't in it?

Furthermore, I hate to talk about the creators of that which we adore so much in such a negative light, but the fact of the matter is the Räbinäs have had precisely nothing to do with this game since 2005 and were barely instrumental to the game's success and prolonged longevity over the years, aside from that initial push for publicity that turned it into what it became and arguably should still be. It wasn't them who built the foundations for car modding, nor was it they who expected track creation to surpass that of the default editor. They didn't factor in font or palette editing to any extent, that was all our doing. It wasn't them who helped to set up the original following on RSC, nor the present iteration on here. It wasn't them who came up with the concept of offline competitions. In the grand scale of things, the Räbinäs are a mere drop in the ocean whose sole contribution was the game itself, and not much else. You as a person may find the contract fair, but to me they are holding you to an unnecessary ransom on behalf of a runaway success story that no-one could have predicted at the time.

And the fact that you are disapproving of the notion of small, frequent updates only tells me things are far worse than you're letting on.

As Luke said, this community is at best one quarter of the size it was at the start of this decade, and out of 20 members that are still active, there are a good 15 or so I recognize from my time here. It's not just stagnant; this community is dying. Since October 2016, only 100 people have joined, including one legend, and I sincerely doubt that it's purely down to the removal of mandatory registration. To put things in perspective, the first 100 members of this site joined over the course of 3 weeks. We reached our 1000th member by July 2010. Even a couple years later, the rate was only down to around 100 per month. Another 3 - 4 years if even that and this place will be a ghost town. Both CoM and ToM have been shut down for the first time in their history for what is now more than a year, and not even the RSC crash was enough to stop the latter. Most subforums have threads on the front page that were last updated 2 or more years ago. Back when I was active, if I ever found myself agreeing with Luke I knew things were proverbialed.

So as it stands, these are your two choices:

1) Renegotiate the terms of your contract, no matter how long, arduous or complicated the proceedings become, and hope to undo some of this damage and prevent GR and its sequel from joining the swiftly-rising list of Kickstarter failures2) Allow things to worsen to a more advanced state than they already are, release GR 2 after an indefinite time period to a crowd of practically nobody, and witness the final dying breaths of this once-great community before its 20th anniversary

I have seen this story way too often these past few years. If you need help, let others know. Allow others the chance to work on the game, even if your current circumstances forbid it. Because in a handful of months you'll be talking to a corpse of a fandom, and by then it'll be too late. The ship will have sailed, and you will be the one to switch the light off on this game's following for good. In the wake of the recent Twin Galaxies' scandal, it has taught me one thing; nothing is set in stone forever. You could still push for an open source release if you wanted to. Hannu and Jukka are human beings like the rest of us, and I'm sure you could come to an understanding if you put your mind to it and told them of the present situation, instead of allowing us all, you included, to suffer in silence.

Fri Feb 09, 2018 11:04 am

James

Joined: Thu Dec 31, 2009 7:26 pmPosts: 267

Re: Developer Blog

puttz wrote:

So, just wondering, why are you spending time making eye candy like leaves that can blow off of trees when it seems like there are a lot more core game mechanisms that should be a priority to get the actual game playable?

I guess that was a bad example.

That particular thing was because I had an idea with a colleague at work, that I wanted to try out, and thought I could translate it into something that would fit nicely in the context of GR. The two things are "separate" in that regard, I'd have tried the idea out somewhere else if not in GR. It was meant to illustrate a point, but I guess it didn't come across very well - sorry.

Bouncebackability wrote:

Do you genuinely believe GR2 is worth pursuing?

On a personal level? Sure. Both Markku and I are still enjoying what we're adding and as time was never an overt objective we made post-Kickstarter, we're not "behind schedule" for want of a better way to phrase that.

I can't really speak for what other people think - but at least I think it's worth it. I know there are a lot of opinions, but I can only answer from my perspective.

Quote:

Also, following your Facebook post, it did cross my mind why do you not ask about releasing GR1 on Steam for free (you may have done this). Perhaps it may help to regain some form of fanbase, especially if you can promote GRIF as an official forum (digging up old debates there).

The simple reason there is cost. There is a submission fee of $100, which isn't that significant by itself, but maintaining a legal entity (i.e. a company) to "do business" with Steam is not cheap, and I'm not really willing to try and "recoup" that cost in any other way. It's something I'd love to do, but it's just not really viable at this point

Alex wrote:

...

I had a really long reply typed out about this (now it's only "moderately long") - both about the points I agree with you on, and about the things in your post that are completely incorrect (and not even in my opinion, just factually). However, I've revised it to cover the fundamental points, as I see them.

The continual refrain that somehow I'm desperate to "control" things is so far from the truth I'm really not even sure of another way to phrase my reaction now. I'm not going to respond to it again - as it seems to make very little difference to the frequency with which it appears. It honestly makes me sad that this is an opinion people have - I have precisely zero interest in that

Judgements of actions are absolutely fair: the project is poorly managed; it has been a very long time; update frequency has been terrible - but no matter how many "rumours" and "theories" people throw around, it's not going to change the fact that we have tried our best here. Taking on GR's development was never my original intention and I guess I'm personally paying the price for not having said, instead, "well, I'm not going to do this." I didn't like the idea of that outcome at the time, and I don't really like the idea of it now - but it would have been easier, for sure..

As much as I don't like the reality of it either, GR is 16 years old. The fact that it has survived this long is absolutely a testament to the community (particularly the folks here) - with only a few small differences in reception amongst the very, very early players, it might never have even gone past a handful of people knowing about it.

I appreciate your comment about the community probably not surviving another 3-4 years - there's really nothing to argue with there, you're right - even though I know that's not what anyone (even me) wants to hear. I hope we can produce something in time to make an appreciable difference, I really do..

I could absolutely contact Hannu again about making GR open source. The difference between the situation you're imagining and the reality, is that I know the contents of our previous discussions about the topic. That does make a difference to whether I'm bringing up a tired old topic, or whether I'm presenting some new reason that fundamentally impacts the previous discussions.

I don't think it's fair for people to criticise Hannu & Jukka for doing what they want to with their work. They've done for more pro-actively with their "work" than the vast majority of people ever do. They were content with the "run" GR had had up to 2003, and that's why GR's last release by them was then... and it took a long time of convincing that GR deserved any kind of a new lease of life past that.

Precisely because the community wasn't content with that, is why we had any kind of concession at all. If somehow circumstances change and there's an opportunity to bring the discussion back up, I absolutely will - because even if I were only to think from a selfish point of view: it's much better for me.

-----

For anyone interested, someone has come forward with a really good suggestion about improving updates with little-to-no effort required from myself and Markku on that front - we're just working out the details about it. Fingers crossed on this one

"The continual refrain that somehow I'm desperate to "control" things is so far from the truth I'm really not even sure of another way to phrase my reaction now. I'm not going to respond to it again - as it seems to make very little difference to the frequency with which it appears. It honestly makes me sad that this is an opinion people have - I have precisely zero interest in that "

Those of us who were around for the founding of this forum (and its previous incarnation) will find that very, very hard to believe. The fact you still cling to GR2.0's "ownership" after all this time also suggests otherwise. And the nonsense around the community pages with the latest update confirms nothing has changed in nine years.

Bottom line is this: there's no excuse for this failure of GR 2.0 being so abysmal. One guy, with no experience, made almost the entirety of Undertale on his own, a game far more complex than this in all bar graphics, and it took him half the time from start to finish - GR2.0 is essentially vaporware.

I really do wish I could come back here and see some semblance of competence on the GR2.0 front, but that dream has faded.

Tue Feb 13, 2018 9:27 pm

AleksiNir

Joined: Fri Jan 08, 2010 2:18 pmPosts: 799Location: Finland

Re: Developer Blog

I think that it's regrettable that the development of GR has fallen into the hands of people who aren't able/willing to devote the needed resources into it, as it's leaving the audience dissatisfied. I think it's fair to criticize the Räbinäs for having handled the situation in a way that is far from optimal, but I also think they have every right to handle it as they choose, and I can understand them having moved on in their lives and not wanting to be pestered about something they did 15 years ago.

However, the attitude that the community is taking towards James (and Markku) and their work is in my opinion distasteful and often disgraceful and even disgusting. As they clearly have other, more pressing responsibilities in their lives, to me it seems that they're doing the best they can. Once again, it is regrettable although to me understandable that they aren't able to do more, but to have doing what is essentially a service that we should be grateful for met with borderline defamation/slander must be extremely disheartening and I commend them for sticking with it despite the discouraging comments.

There definitely are areas to be criticized about how they've dealt with this process, namely the lack of communication, but perceiving them and talking to them as if they were an enemy isn't gonna lead into any improvements. The situation we're finding ourselves in sucks for probably everyone involved, but rather than resorting to aggression we should stick to empathy and constructiveness to get the best out of it.

I think that it's regrettable that the development of GR has fallen into the hands of people who aren't able/willing to devote the needed resources into it, as it's leaving the audience dissatisfied.

There is no need to make it Open Source, just make a selection of the right people here in the community that is able to work on it, and has the will to work on it, and you will still keep the word given to the Rabina Brothers. Just increase your team with two or three more poeple. Keep it private, but make it happen.

I don´t know. There are several ways to be able to get the game updated and worked in a faster way. Please JAMES, read this, please, you know there are many options.

I stand with AleksiNir too here. I know that I'm disappointed that GR2 doesn't come out at a fast pace and that lack of updates gave the everything away, but then again I still follow GR2 even if I haven't played anything at this time, and I look forward for every time a new progress is made. Yes, it takes eternity, but it needs process and plenty of available time to make it work.

In addition, my focus on my final paper work ended me having to abandon all the progress in my content creations in games for a while because I know I have to graduate by this year, so from the condition I can understand.

Thank you James and especially Tuomo! That was a very emotional and inspirational post!! Excatly the kind of commitment and love the community needs!!

Wed Apr 04, 2018 9:37 am

Marco

Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:33 amPosts: 540Location: Lithuania

Re: Developer Blog

Yay...

The devs and the community needs positivity instead of demoralizing comments... I'm sure Tuomo will help achieve this and let's hope this will give the team a bit more time to concentrate on the game itself...

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